Disabling Profile Caching on NT4.x

[Wolfgang Ratzka]

>>>>> "DC" == Dana Canfield <canfield at uindy.edu> writes:

    DC> Out of curiosity, is there any way to get around this problem
    DC> with a real NT PDC?  I know NTWorkstation doesn't support
    DC> quotas, but does NTServer?  Does MS just assume that your
    DC> servers have infinite space?  Just wondering.

In a way, Samba (PDC or not) is better at supporting quotas than any
NT machine, as it will automatically use the quota support of the
underlying OS.  Regarding NT: quotas are among the many things
promised for "The Next Version To Come [TM]". Currently you have to
rely on 3rd party software to support them.  

[Remembering that the first releases of Sun's Solaris 2 didn't support
quotas either (it gave you nice mysterious crashes if you tried to use
them) my suspicion is that quotas are mainly for the academic
clientele and therefore generally not too high on the priority lists
(Talking to support people who didn't know what quotas are or whether
they work or not certainly added to this impression... ).]

Please note, however, that NT's strategy for server-based profiles
will always have problems with quotas or any disk space limitations:
The profiles are copied from the server when the user logs in, and
copied back to the server when the user logs out. If during the user's
session the size of the user's (local) profile directory tree should
have grown beyond the space available on the server, there will be a
problem...

One could consider a setup, where the physical disk space on the NT
system partition is limited, so that the above situation cannot
arise. But I don't want to know what other performance problems you
are going to run into, when space on "C:" is running low.

So the only viable strategy is to relocate those parts of the user's
environment that might possibly become large. This would be the
desktop folder, the Personal folder ("Eigene Dateien" in German NT) 
and possibly the AppData folder ("Anwendungsdaten" in German NT).
To achive that, either directly modify the values in the key
"HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\User Shell Folders"
to point directly to locations in the user's home directory
(or rather use the policy editor to do that.)

-- 
Wolfgang Ratzka  Phone: +49 6421 28 3531  FAX: +49 6421 28 6994
Uni Marburg,  HRZ, Hans-Meerwein-Str., D-35032 Marburg, Germany
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